


On Psi Corps Arranged Marriages (Part 4)

by pallasite



Series: Behind the Gloves [113]
Category: Babylon 5, Babylon 5 & Related Fandoms
Genre: Arranged Marriage, Backstory, Canon Compliant, Essays, Fix-It, Gen, How canon misled you, Psi Corps, Telepath culture, Worldbuilding, telepaths
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-05-05
Updated: 2018-05-05
Packaged: 2019-05-02 12:22:22
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 895
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14544645
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/pallasite/pseuds/pallasite
Summary: The fourth part of a comprehensive essay on marriage in the Corps.This time, the history a generation later, when Vacit is in charge of the Corps.The prologue ofBehind the Glovesishere- please read!





	On Psi Corps Arranged Marriages (Part 4)

**Author's Note:**

> What is this series? Where are the acknowledgements, table of contents and universe timelines? See [here](http://archiveofourown.org/works/10184558/chapters/22620590).
> 
> If you like _Behind the Gloves_ and would like to send me an email, I can be reached at counterintuitive at protonmail dot com. Do you have questions? Would you like to tell me what you like about this project? Email me!
> 
> I also have an [ask blog](https://behind-the-gloves.tumblr.com/), a [writing blog](https://www.tumblr.com/blog/pallasite-writes), and a "P3 life" Tumblr [here](https://www.tumblr.com/blog/p3-life) with funny anecdotes. :)

Part 1 is [here](https://archiveofourown.org/works/14408412). Summary of Part 1: Arranged marriages in the Corps are not what you think, are not as common as you think, always involve consenting adults, and no one is _forced_ to marry or breed.

Part 2 is [here](https://archiveofourown.org/works/14539404). Summary of Part 2: Policies of genetic matching in the Corps were developed, in a "big picture" sense, to help protect Earth from future Shadow invasion. Most telepaths don't know about this, however, and so to them, these practices exist as part of a century of tradition, culture, and values.

Part 3 is [here](https://archiveofourown.org/works/14544210). Summary of Part 3: Arranged marriages started in the MRA, under Crawford. They began as yet another policy by which normals attempted to make telepaths into a separate, subservient caste.

When Vacit took over, he had other plans.

\-----

Dark Genesis, p. 217-218:

"When I touched the artifacts from Mars, I came to understand something else. Something truly profound. There are beings out there in the cosmos, Ms. Alexander, beside whom even the Centauri look like cavemen. Some, I'm certain, are benevolent - those who made the artifacts on Mars, for instance. At least so it seems. But I also have the impression - no, the certainty - that there are others, who could and would destroy our race with no more thought or effort than you and I would expend to kill a bug on our kitchen floor.

"When we meet those beings, we will need every weapon we can get our hands on, and among those weapons I include ourselves. We will need the most powerful teeps we can find - more powerful than any we presently have, I think. P14s, P30s, if such a thing is possible. And stable telekinetics." He heaved a sigh. "I can't even tell you why I think that, exactly, and for some reason it angers me when I examine it closely. But I am certain."

"So the arranged marriages were your idea. To prepare us to fight these aliens, if they truly exist?"

"Oh, they exist. But no, the genetic matching was already in place when I started working for Crawford. I encouraged it."

\-----

I expand on that scene in the third chapter of [Natasha Alexander's fic](https://archiveofourown.org/works/11991930/chapters/27188667), placing that conversation more appropriately _after_ the upcoming meeting with the Vorlon on Venus, and explaining a few missing pieces in canon. Chief among these missing pieces is the central _why_ : The Corps needs to take these extreme measures to defend humanity from the Shadows because of all those massacres, murders and abortions that happened in 2115, 2156, and every other year across the Earth Alliance. Canon shows these events happening at the beginning of the book, it mentions them again in the middle, it mentions them again at the end of Final Reckoning... but somehow never mentions that this is _why_ all these desperate measures were necessary. (They gave you all the spokes of the "wheel," but without the central fact that holds them all together, and shows this to be _a wheel_.)

So that was Vacit's motivation.

To that end, he set up a massive bureaucracy inside the Corps to track the genealogy of all telepaths (through DNA testing at birth), to develop algorithms for predicting the best genetic matches to produce children who are stronger telepathically than their parents, and to screen all telepath marriage applications, across the entire EA, by these criteria. (With the exception of same-sex marriage applications... that's a subject for another essay!)

As I explained before, and will explain in more detail later, the Corps does not force anyone to get married or to have a baby, but they do _suggest_.

**And the suggestions don't come from the Corps in the sense that you get some letter in the mail saying "we want you to marry this person!", but from your own teachers, supervisors etc., who know both you and the other person, and who think you'd make a good match. The Corps bureaucracy just has to approve it.**

In the Corps, this genealogy/matching department has a lot of power. They can say "no" to a marriage. (They usually deny marriages because according to their algorithms, any future children would have statistically low odds of being telepathically of equal or greater strength than the parents, but there can be other reasons, too - such as if they realize that the applicants are actually siblings who didn't know about each other. Given the way children are raised in the Corps, how common IVF is, and how often paternity is lied about, I think this might happen in the Corps more often than people realize. "Sorry, she's your sister.")

This genealogy department does, indirectly, have a lot of power over people's lives. (And if you're the director, you can even make someone "appear out of thin air"!)

Garibaldi to Derrick Thompson, a telepath who has the misfortune of having to work with him during the hunt for Bester after the war:

          Thompson: "Could he have family here?"

          Garibaldi: "Family? You know better than that. Bester wasn't just raised by the Corps, they gave _birth_ to him. There are absolutely no records linking him to any other human being."

          Thompson: "I noticed that. That's weird, even for the old Psi Corps. Keeping track of genealogies, notably for breeding purposes, was everything, especially back then."

(Garibaldi then goes on to make some bigoted remarks about telepaths.)


End file.
